Day 317, January 26, 2021

Community Service

Today's soundtrack is yesterday's soundtrack continued: (about 1.5 hrs in) 3hr. Dark Star

I am engaged in a writing project with a couple of friends and we are trying to investigate the roots of our social justice focus in life. Where did that come from? Who influenced us? What made a difference? 

I've tried to write a bit about the importance of reading, how some of our childhood failings shape us, how we sometimes are lucky enough to find mentors in life.

Sometimes it is just living that shapes us.

Subconsciously, I have always been aware of being different. Somewhere in the pre-history of the self, was a history of war. In school, the only times Korea was ever mentioned was in relationship to the Korean War and references to the hermit kingdom. 

What bleeds out of a Bueno
y Sano Thai chicken burrito.

I still remember in grade school wanting to do a report on the first ironclad ship, and the teacher asked if I was going to write about the Monitor or the Merrimack, and I said neither. I was going to write about the legendary Korean turtle boat. He laughed and said that sounded like a fairy tale. I argued that it was true, and he said, if I could find it in the encyclopedia, then it must be true and I could do a report on it. Of course, in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, there was no mention of the geobukseon and I was relegated to a joke for the teachers to pass around and for other kids to overhear.

When we went to the mall, there was inevitably the old veteran sitting on a bench who drew me in too close and would tell me about his Korean girlfriend and how he had been too ashamed to take off his boots when he visited her house because he had holes in his socks and his father had taken offense. I absorbed these stories, and recognized the ability for these men to pick me out among all the other children to talk to, to lean in too close and speak in words tinged with both hatred and longing. 

When I went to play at my friend's house at the bottom of the hill, his house was identical to the one I lived in, only the layout was reversed. Our houses were built by the same developer, using the same blueprint, only slightly altered. In his basement he had a tremendous army of plastic soldiers, hundreds of them. Some crouched aiming rifles, some lay on their bellies, others were caught in mid throw of a grenade, and some were frozen in various poses of running with bayonets mounted to the ends of their rifles. My friend always played with the dark green figures and I always played with the yellow ones, some of which were carefully sculpted with bucktooth grins.

It was a time when calling someone a Jap was still commonplace, and Made in Japan was shorthand for cheap junk. 

There was no specialized slur for Koreans. I was called a chink or Jap. I was told to go back where I came from. There was some phrase about real Americans that I can't quite remember, but I remember the feeling. It inspired a distaste for the American flag and the pledge of allegiance, as they came to symbolize all the things I would never be, never be able to hold as my own.

And behind all that, was the war, the idea that there was some tragic past that pieced together from stories I heard from my parents, from the history books, from television. My parents never censored what I could watch on television, except for MASH because of how it depicted Koreans. So, the few times I saw popular depictions of Koreans on tv, it was covertly when my parents were out, and it was shameful.

I was terrible at fighting. I was a slight little kid who could not throw a baseball or catch a football. I got sat on at the bus stop until the bus came. I mostly just imagined what it would be like to be able to stand up for myself. 

My friend Charles was always cool. We grew apart for a while, and by the time we reconnected, he had undergone a whole different evolution into someone who was confident in himself, who listened to The Police on metal Denon cassettes, and who embraced a vision and history of Koreans as tough cool people worthy of respect and admiration. I admired Charles and wished I had that confidence in myself, in my identity.

When I reached high school, I weighted 125 lbs wet. When I graduated, at the end of football season, I was a sturdy 185 lbs. I still didn't know how to throw a baseball, but nobody sat on me at the bus stop anymore. 

But, I still didn't really have a sense of identity, who I was and how I fit into this world.

My senior year of high school, the school instituted a plan for all students to engage in community service projects. We all had to find some organization where we would volunteer and get some supervisor to certify the hours we spent in service. I found a soup kitchen in an adjoining town that was in the basement of a church. 

Every night, after preparing and serving the food, the volunteers would make their own plates and join the people sitting at the folding tables. We were encouraged to not sit with other volunteers, and so each night I sat with strangers and heard their stories, listened to their grievances, contemplated their delusions. It seemed a world removed from my life as a student. I found that people enjoyed talking with me. There was something about me that drew them to start talking. Like the veterans at the mall sitting on benches, the patrons of the soup kitchen found an audience with this boy who was willing to press palms with people who considered themselves too dirty to touch. 

After I had fulfilled my community service hours, I kept going. I started arriving early, before the doors opened so I could talk with the people milling around outside. It got so that I became a regular and people knew my name, remembered who I was. I think they appreciated the compassion, but also the respect. I somehow knew from the start that what people wanted was to be treated with respect, like their lives mattered to someone. 

I began to think that I had an innate skill with the indigent and I remember one particularly embarrassing time when I cockily approached a homeless veteran in a park and tried to engage him in conversation. He started yelling and screaming incoherently and ran away from me. He was younger than the Korean vets, someone back from Vietnam, I imagine. I remember trying to call him back and he just yelled for me to get away from him.

It is healthy, I suppose, to be reminded that we are idiots sometimes too. 

Somewhere in there, amidst a whole slew of other experiences, I learned to care for other people outside of my self, my self-interests. 

I think the soup kitchen was just the manifestation of something that I had been piecing together over years, from the bus stop teasing, to the shame of seeing how one's self was depicted on television and in movies, to the creepy guys in malls, to my efforts to reshape myself. How can I take the things I know and make something useful? I feel like I'm still trying to figure that out. But maybe that's what I was trying to do in those proto-versions of myself. 

Amidst the teenage awkwardness and self-centeredness, there was something that was emerging. It was tied to not only feeling indignant about the world, but then trying to do something to change it.

I guess that's tonight's meditation.

Take care and be well,

Leo

The Sawmill River before the snow.